Husker Du

If you don’t stop to smell the roses now/ They might end up on you

(“These Important Years”)

A screeching tire before the run-up, a lump swallowed before leaping into the void, a tape squeezed into rewind: when a record opens with a supersonic glissando, the feeling of being pulled into a scrum is overpowering. That slightest of pushes could hurl us anywhere: backward, into a sweaty pool of hardcore, or forward, into the posterized bedrooms of X Generation. As for the band, they'd rather stay nailed to the border like a floral Checkpoint Charlie, a lysergic top spinning off sparks in every time and place. You find yourself swept up by the tornado before you've even realized the wind has picked up, and from there you go tumbling down through a broken kaleidoscope.

It's all already there in that enigmatic cover art (designed, as ever, by Grant Hart), the latest piece of a coded puzzle that amounts to a whole imaginary world of its own, a serialized charade that's kept fans hooked for six years: mysterious objects piled up in a phosphorescent haze, a proto-vaporwave update of the three appliances on "Three Imaginary Boys". A "psychedelic funeral parlor", according to Bob Mould, or more simply a still life putting on a few too many airs. It's not a random comparison: the 1986 Hüsker Dü are, to all intents and purposes, a diorama passed off as a real scene, a stuffed animal emitting pre-recorded calls. The chaos that usually precedes collapse is raging: joining the Warner stable meant enormous visibility, yes, but also superhero-level schedules (and, all things considered, few luxuries, given that Greg Norton is still the one driving the van). With live commitments multiplied tenfold, the old strategy of trying out new songs during soundchecks before testing them in front of an audience is no longer viable. The new practice will be to rent "warehouses" as needed, both for writing and rehearsing. The two roosters are now scratching about in separate coops, each pecking his own feed and inseminating different hens: golden or not, the eggs can only taste different now. Bitter.

Bob and Grant can no longer stand each other, tangled up as they are, among other things, in their respective addictions (alcohol for the former, heroin for the latter, who, thanks to a faulty test, is even convinced he's contracted HIV). The guitarist, however, pulls off an unexpected turnaround: after Norton's wedding party, he finds the strength to quit drinking and, determined to keep pulling the plow until the ground gives way beneath him, takes back the reins with a dictator's grip. He starts by dictating terms on the singles: two of his songs, or no deal. He does even worse with the album's tracklist: he refuses to work on his bandmate's compositions in order to keep them out of the count, "otherwise we'd be even, and that's never going to happen, not in this band." But Grant digs his heels in too, and by the end of the day there are a full twenty songs on the table, half from one, half from the other: two albums in one, no more, no less. Neither man intends to give an inch, and the only way to calm the waters is to risk another double LP, an arrogant long-distance challenge to their most celebrated work. Needless to say, the label isn't having it and tries to reject the idea, but the St. Paul trio has a semi-legendary reputation behind it and a contract that literally authorizes them to do whatever they want: for these and other mysterious reasons they manage to get their way, something unheard of at the time and even more unthinkable today (both Mould and Hart, in any case, later said they regretted the gargantuan whim, dismissing it as "an excuse to flex muscle"). Warner manages to impose only two restrictions: reduced royalties for the two songwriters (basically as if it were a single LP) and a simplified package compared to the original plan. No great loss: when you're already out on the ledge, being well dressed is a mere detail.

The sessions unfold in a surreal atmosphere: separated under the same roof, the two leading men don't speak to each other and avoid one another as much as possible, while poor Norton prefers to keep a low profile just to escape that grotesque tension (on some tracks it's the other two who handle the bass lines). On top of this comes pressure from the label to brighten up the sound, leading to some less-than-happy choices in the studio (overdubbed cymbals, for one) and in the mix (keeping the vocals much higher than the music). It sounds like the account of a disaster, but it will turn out to be the premise for a miracle. Despite the disastrous retreat of the troops (or perhaps precisely because of it), these "stories from the warehouse" still echo today as the swan song of American alternative rock, the shaky seal on a national epic told entirely in subtraction, the final whistle of a match refereed with one eye closed, often both. The turbulent birth of a crisis in its advanced stages, it mirrors with moving honesty the confusion of its protagonists, young men adrift but also vigorous ringleaders generous with advice and shoulders to cry on.

With psychedelic posturing and pianistic-folk flourishes stripped away, what's reinforced instead is the depth of a sound that, somewhere in the vicinity of Ramones as produced by Spector, turns into an intricate web of compression and reverb, proto-shoegaze in texture, pop in outcome and perhaps even in intent, about as far as you can get from the raw, live-in-the-room approach of their SST-era beginnings. Where "Candy Apple Grey" offered varied concision, here the approach is uniform and overflowing, as if the same theme were being repeated endlessly in an attempt to grasp its ultimate essence, with a dizzying recursiveness. If the leap into the void of "Zen Arcade" (the Iliad that shatters every taboo) was a march through gunfire, the stubborn, tortoise-like persistence of "Warehouse" (the Odyssey that brings everything back home) is trench warfare, holding position even at the cost of collapsing from hunger; the former retires the entire hardcore movement, rendering it obsolete, the latter buries an entire decade by exhausting its possibilities.

The two pilots' flight paths diverge: Mould (optimistic but serious-minded) aims to carve out, once and for all, his droning provincial epic, while Hart (desperate but playful) aims to sabotage himself by sneaking in acoustic instruments, percussion, sound effects and field recordings. Melodic craftsmanship is at its zenith, and the tracklist is a dazzling chase after the perfect song: from this point of view, it's the most authentically rock record they ever made. If twenty albums each contained just one of these songs, they might all be classics in their own right: squandering so many at once is proof of a brazenly bulimic talent, a lesson from star pupils who nonetheless keep their feet on the ground, charged with the poignant awareness that there won't be a second chance, and for that reason invested with a visceral urgency.

The theme is no longer maturing, but surviving in a world that ignores and scorns their painful progress all the same, with the constant sense that everything could end at any moment (for them especially: it's no accident the two seem to keep lobbing accusations at each other between the lines, like the most calligraphic of love stories). Lots of small tales of failure in place of one organic narrative, with few flights of fancy: "The revolution begins in front of the bathroom mirror," the liner notes proclaim (a line that pierces Mould as he stares in horror at his own reflection, shortly before he swears off the bottle, having realized he's "turning into his father": a predictable reaction for a punk, less so for someone who, on the previous record, was asking "what will I do when my parents die?"). More than an album that grows with the listener, it's an album that watches the listener grow. Even though the songs are sequenced with the sole logic of alternating two songwriters whose paths never crossed, the result holds together with granite-like cohesion, and the tension you feel from start to finish is that of the most gripping of stories. It's an album suspended, unreally, between opium and speed, a spiral of concentric circles that leaves you dazed, the kind of record that, reviewed after the fact, makes you ask the reader where they were the first time they heard it.

That glissando, as we were saying: the elastic snap of a slingshot, and you're already in the eye of the storm. There's little to argue about: "These Important Years" is the "My Generation" of the '80s, the definitive anthem of adolescence on the run: what would once have been called a "generational anthem," precisely the fruit of a deliberate authorial choice of responsibility, a conative anthem oozing romanticism through open-tuned Flying Vs, taken terribly seriously. It knocks you down and picks you back up with the same blow, like the most skilled and caring of coaches. Also by Mould: the dramatic dash up the stairs of "Standing In The Rain" and the bipolar moods of "Ice Cold Ice", micro cinematic sequences more than simple songs. Hart, for his part, counters with a wise lightening of that emotional intensity, amid the chiming Wilson-esque bells of "Charity, Chastity, Prudence And Hope" and the carefree falsetto of "Back From Somewhere" (which, however, collapses into a chilling slowdown, the fatal comedown of a high taken too lightly), before going on to dominate side B, opened by the poppy divertissement "You're A Soldier": while Mould pays tribute to his beloved '60s with "Could You Be The One?" and "Friend, You've Got To Fall" (a not-so-veiled jab at his bandmate's little vice, a sort of "Life Of Pain" part II that lifts its riff from the Yardbirds' "Over, Under, Sideways, Down") and reassures longtime fans with the lightning-fast somersaults of "Visionary", it's Hart who lands the knockout blows with the poisoned spices of "Too Much Spice", between rock'n'roll licks and stretched-out ninth chords, and the abrasive electric flood of "She Floated Away", which closes out the first (euphoric) record with enchanted glockenspiel and flute flourishes over a Celtic melody and a Dylan-esque lyric.

The second (resigned) record opens with a drastic shift in mood, foreshadowed by a very dark ambient recording: "Bed Of Nails" and "Tell You Why Tomorrow", though undercut by a parodic cuckoo clock, are anguished, claustrophobic AOR melodramas, and it's perhaps for this reason that the woozy stammerings of "It's Not Peculiar" shine like crystals (of methamphetamine). And yet, even a filler track like "Actual Condition", which whiffs of the proletarian swagger of their eternal rivals the Replacements, is breathtaking in its lethal precision, while the old visionary streak is confirmed by the reversed incense-swirls of "No Reservations", the peak of their magmatic raga-rock.

"Turn It Around" and "She's A Woman (And Now He's A Man)", magnificently carefree, serve as a launching pad for the ecstatic flap of wings that is "Up In The Air" (later covered by Heidi Berry), a takeoff with no landing in sight. Closing things out is the chaotic fatalism of "You Can Live At Home", drunk and intoxicating, with that invitation to "live at home" that American Football would take to heart a decade or so later (fittingly, the band that would sign off on '90s emo, a direct offshoot of this death-knell for '80s introspection). That coda could go on forever, and, in our heads at least, it probably will.

Not since "Third/Sister Lovers" had power-pop sounded this fresh, inspired and ever-shifting, and it's rarely sounded that way since. The interweaving of psychedelia and punk, melody and speed, sweetness and noise is at the state of the art: the friction between the sizzling polyurethane foam of the guitar strings (warm/vintage/rock) and the tragicomic dryness of the snare (cold/modern/pop) forges one of the last credible evolutions of guitar-oriented music, quilted with vocal harmonies that are anything but flawless yet enormously charming.

By smoothing over the differences between the Sixties and the Eighties, the record officially paves the way for the decade to come, one our heroes will never see: the definitive rift between the two leaders, the worsening of Hart's drug addiction (which would give rise to a couple of unpleasant episodes on the subsequent tour, documented on the posthumous live album "The Living End") and the suicide of their troubled manager David Savoy would soon bring down the curtain on the most thrilling experience in world alternative rock, but not before a farewell that was stunning in every sense of the word.

Steadfast in a consistency with themselves that neither Warner's six-figure sums nor the courtship of a heavyweight like Cliff Burnstein ever managed to buy, they never gave in to the petty temptation of a reunion, turning themselves into rock's ultimate chimera: evidently, nothing more could be added, and Grant Hart's untimely death, on September 13, 2017, has since loaded these twenty glittering gems with an even greater symbolic weight.

The album came out in January 1987, preceded by the bizarre promo "The Warehouse Interview", featuring 12 tracks interspersed with interview snippets and now highly sought after by collectors. It would sell 125,000 copies: a lot, for a former indie band, but not a huge amount, considering the label's promotional investment (which largely swallowed up the earnings), and not much more than in the SST era. A stunted commercial success that, in hindsight, turns out to be a triumph on the philosophical and political level: proof that the major-label model, with its cumbersome, expensive machinery, simply doesn't work, even when it doesn't distort the music itself the way Warner boasts of not doing. By inaugurating the co-opting and monetizing of the independent scene, the band exposed, at their own expense, the inadequacy of the new arrangement. Something that, in any case, would no longer concern them.

Precarious, imperfect, exasperatingly wordy, "Warehouse: Songs And Stories" is the peak of second-era Hüsker Dü, a snapshot of an era at its end, an instruction manual for staying alive amid one's own chaos.

Walk, walk, walk away, keep on walking away

(“You Can Live At Home”)

RIP Grant Hart (1961-2017)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

02/02/2019